No sun is in sight in the beginning of Aleksandr Sokurov’s look at the last days of divinity for Emperor Hirohito (Issei Ogata) — unless you count that descendant of the sun goddess, the emperor himself. He’s hunkered down in the wood-paneled, brocaded depths of a bomb shelter under his palace, emerging into the light only to indulge in his hobby of marine biology in an above-ground lab, where he inspects a tiny crab.
When the Americans come, however, the emperor is the specimen being studied — by US Army photographers, who note his resemblance to Charlie Chaplin, by Douglas MacArthur (Robert Dawson), who asks how someone could send millions to their deaths, and by his subjects, who hear his voice for the first time as he renounces his godhood. Sokurov doesn’t answer MacArthur’s disingenuous question, but as in Moloch (1999) and Taurus (2000), his equally eccentric portraits of Hitler and Lenin, he suggests why no one else can either.
